Growing and Changing....

An unusual experience tonight.
Forgive me if I am light on the details and talk in generalities. Although I do realise a blog bares all to the world, I have never quite got to the "soul stripped bare" stage even behind an alternate identity and there are sensibilities to be considered, past and present.

I'm not sure where the beginning is -  tonight with coming home tired, or further back? 
Further back for context.
I came onto S/L (before Lacewing) to explore things in my head. Was I submissive? How deep did that go? To resolve some things that my R/L did not easily facilitate. Like many people I suspect, I anticipated a superficial experience.
In my 1st year on here, I  experienced growth in a great many ways, all unexpected, and going much deeper than I realised they would be.
I learned a sense of belonging in places I didn't expect to feel comfortable in, I had my thresholds and comfort zones with regard to my own actions gently and progressively challenged to the point where the walls I had built within and around myself that were inhibiting my personal growth were chipped away. 
I became someone who was fearless of circumstances and who could cope with most places and events. Eventually my "limits" became solely governed by my innate tastes and morality rather than a lifetime of learned and acquired inhibitions. 
I became free.

Fast forward.
Tonight there is a silks party at a club that I have been attached to in all it's rebuilds and forms in all of mine. My partner suggests we go.
It has to be said I'm tired after a long day. Not fall-asleep tired, just flat and weary tired. 
I dig out my silks.
Well, it's like R/L on the night of a party you haven't prepared for. None of them fit properly, all of them have other associations.
We go.
I suddenly feel vulnerable in an unexpected way and would not have gone in without my partner.
I'm sure I have walked naked in this club. I know most of the people in the club. I used to pole dance here. What has happened to me, in me?

Have I lost my nerve, regressed? Have I lost the freedom of that chipped-away wall? I don't think so. I think what I am seeing and feeling is the selective rebuilding of my personal low wall, the one that is not all-surrounding and built of inhibitions and someone else's legacy morality, but the one where I select the stones and place them. It's growth.

Freedom is not everything stripped away, it is choosing what pieces to put back.
I can bare all, I choose not to. I know this, tonight I feel it too.